From 1967 to 1981, Jerry Cohen was chief legal counsel to the United Farm Workers, joining Cesar Chavez in the bitter fight in the late 1960s and 1970s that successfully organized tens of thousands of farmworkers.  As the UFW’s general counsel, he battled judges to get farmworkers out of jail, negotiated hard-fought contracts with resistant growers from Delano to Salinas and was instrumental in winning a landmark labor law that gives farmworkers the right to choose their union. Cohen graduated from U.C. Berkeley’s law school during the height of the Free Speech Movement.  He was attracted to the Farmworkers Movement and after a meeting with Cesar Chavez, the union voted him in as the UFW’s first general counsel in 1967 at the age of 27.